Christopher Lasch

The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.

The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.

Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.

Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects, and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of colour. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'

You've gotta be very careful that grace and politeness do not merge into a banality of behavior, where we're just nice, sort of 'death by cupcake.'